Science Fiction
by Person4
Summary: They drove back to the base in an uncomfortable silence. Set just after Mission 12: "A Christmas Gift"


They drove back to the base in an uncomfortable silence. The town outside of their windows was brightly decorated for the holidays, but all of their eyes carefully avoided looking at all the strings of lights, lush garlands, and massive wreaths as much as possible. J had briefly turned on the radio a while back, but they'd only made it a minute and a half through _I'll Be Home For Christmas_ before he turned it straight off again.

None of them really wanted to think about their last mission.

When they were ten minutes away from headquarters, Derek finally broke the silence. "You know, we do have a time machine. The one we pulled out to get the Mona Lisa painted, remember? Just... throwing that out there."

"We're only there to provide support. We don't interfere." Even J didn't think he sounded like he actually believed what he was saying instead of just regurgitating the code they'd all learned by rote.

"Oh, that is a bullshit excuse, man, and you know it," Morris broke in with his two cents. "Not one of us agreed to that thinking that one day Kahn would send us off to dance for a little girl trying to bring her _dead daddy home for Christmas._ I dunno about you two, but I know I would've had second thoughts about getting into the EBA instead of musical theater if that'd been in the brochure."

"And you can't tell me you think those two would still have thanked us for what we did if they'd known we could keep him from dying to begin with if we wanted to." Derek slumped down in his seat, folding his arms over his chest. "We are so lucky it turns out that ghosts do exist. I don't want to think about how that mission would've ended if helped them get their hopes up for nothing."

It said something about how unappealing the whole experience had been for them that having seen proof of life after death with their own eyes was far from the forefront of their minds.

"Even if he hadn't come back, her mother was in a much more stable state of mind by the end. That's... something," J said lamely. Of course it _was_ a good thing that the woman was able to look back on the happy times she'd had with her husband now instead of trying not to think about him at all, but that alone wouldn't exactly have made a satisfying end to the mission.

The looks on the other two agents' faces told him loud and clear that they were thinking the exact same thing.

"Listen," he tried again, "even if we tried using the time machine, it wouldn't work. We'd just cause a paradox when we change history because of this mission only to never have had this mission to begin with after he survives. I doesn't work." He couldn't really believe that he was arguing for letting an innocent man die, leaving behind his wife and child, but it had to be done. He was the team leader, and part of the responsibility that came with that was not letting his men do anything crazy with their equipment.

"Now that's easy to fix," Morris surprised him by saying. "We just bring him back to now after we save him. They still think he's dead, we still get called into help, and we can send him home later tonight as the best Christmas present that little girl will ever get."

"I'm pretty sure somebody would have noticed if he hadn't left a body, Morris," he said, his hands tightening around the steering wheel as he thought of all the ways they could mess up if they tried doing anything more involved than dancing outside of their own time period. "And if we did this, how would his ghost have gotten here this morning? How would we even get to the time machine to begin with? You know that Kahn keeps it locked away when it isn't being used on a mission just to keep people from doing things like this. What makes this man so special that we'd go back to save him, and not any of the other people who die every day? Which of you wants to be the one to tell his family that the entire time they've been mourning he's been just fine, but we kept him away from them? What are you going to say to _Kahn_ to keep him from firing us all for such a blatant misuse of government property, and don't even think of saying 'It was the right thing to do' because he'll want a better reason than that, Derek." He raked a hand through his hair, not even caring about the mess it made of his pompadour, as he drove through the entrance of the renovated cave that served as the EBA's garage. "Answer all those questions and... maybe we could start coming up with a plan."

As the other two agents bent their head together and began chattering to each other in an excited whisper, resembling for all the world a pair of kids with some great secret, J could only hope that they wouldn't manage to come up with solutions to every problem he'd mentioned. It had to be for the best that was. Trying to change things with time travel never helped anyone. A million science fiction movies couldn't be wrong. 


End file.
